How Superheroes Made Movie Stars Expendable

The Hollywood overhauls that got us from Bogart to Batman.

A business once ruled by star power is now dominated by intellectual property.

Illustration by Nishant Choksi

Late in the fall of 2014, an entity calling itself Guardians of Peace began leaking e-mails and other private material belonging to Sony Pictures. Sensational headlines quickly followed. The hack was reportedly the work of the North Korean government, possibly in retaliation for the portrayal of Kim Jong Un in the as yet unreleased Sony comedy “The Interview.” (North Korea denied this.) Among other things, the e-mails revealed that Jennifer Lawrence was paid significantly less than men whose stardom didn’t equal hers and that, before attending a Democratic fund-raiser featuring Barack Obama, Amy Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures, had joked with the producer Scott Rudin about which recent movies starring black people the President might have liked. On the heels of these and other reports came opinion pieces arguing that journalists were abetting the hackers by publishing the stolen information.

Another story was getting lost. Sony, which from 2002 to 2012 had generally been one of the top earners at the box office, was failing as a studio. Under Pascal’s leadership, Sony released a mix of tentpole films—the latest James Bonds, “Da Vinci Code” sequels—and star-driven vehicles often featuring Will Smith or Adam Sandler. (“Will and Adam bought our houses,” Sony execs liked to say.) Sprinkled among these were mid-budget, low-concept movies aimed at adults. Pascal had taken pride in Sony’s reputation as a “relationship studio,” built on its connections with talent. She was literate and smart, and alive to what makes a story click. Sony owned the rights to Spider-Man, and Pascal made intelligent use of them—her choices for director (Sam Raimi, of “Evil Dead” fame) and star (dewy-eyed Tobey Maguire) were unexpected, and together they made a movie that honored fans and non-fans alike. (“Spider-Man 2” was good, too.)

In the long run, it didn’t matter. Sony did not own the intellectual property, or “I.P.,” necessary to build out Spider-Man into a “cinematic universe”—that is, a fictional world that transfers from picture to picture, so that, instead of a single story line with a new installment every few years, a studio can release two or three “quasi-sequels,” as one Marvel executive has put it, in the span of a single year. Marvel pioneered the cinematic universe, hatching a plan in 2005 that it launched with the release of “Iron Man,” three years later. Without the requisite I.P., Sony couldn’t compete. “I only have the spider universe not the marvel universe,” Pascal explained to a colleague, in a 2014 e-mail. (The studio had had a chance to buy nearly all Marvel’s big characters, on the cheap, in the late nineties, but declined.) In another e-mail, Pascal suggested that she was trying to create an “un-marvel marvel world that is rooted in humanity.”

As Sony faltered, its rival, Disney, was enjoying an embarrassment of I.P. riches. First, it began remaking its animated classics as live-action features; then, in 2009, Disney bought Marvel, for four billion dollars. In 2012, it acquired Lucasfilm, the parent company of “Star Wars,” for another four billion. By 2015, Disney was releasing one new movie from the “Star Wars” universe and two or more movies from the Marvel universe every year.

Located nowhere in actual history or geography (or, maybe, human experience), a cinematic universe need not be limited by cultural specificity or nuance. What plays in Sioux City plays in Bayonne will play in Chongqing. The rise of the cinematic universe is inseparable from the rise of a truly global cinematic marketplace, dominated by China. In “The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of the Movies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz shares a startling fact: in 2005, the highest-grossing film in China was “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” which took in just under twelve million dollars. In 2017, a “Fast and the Furious” sequel made almost four hundred million there.

To write “The Big Picture,” Fritz sifted through all the Sony e-mails made public by the hack. “This was, I realized, a way to embed myself inside a studio,” he writes. The surprising undersong to the story he tells is one of pathos—the pathos of an old-school studio head becoming an anomaly in a Hollywood increasingly overseen by brand managers. Fritz quotes at length from an extraordinary St. Crispin’s Day-like pep talk that Rudin delivered to Pascal, via e-mail, in 2014. Rudin had been trying to get Sony to back the movie “Steve Jobs,” with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography. David Fincher was going to direct, but then he dropped out and Danny Boyle took over; Christian Bale was going to star, then maybe Leonardo DiCaprio, or perhaps Bradley Cooper or Matt Damon or Ben Affleck. Now it was Michael Fassbender. Pascal had wavered, and let Rudin take the movie to Universal. When Rudin e-mailed her, she was trying to get it back.

“Why have the job if you can’t do this movie?” he asked her. “So you’re feeling wobbly in the job right now. Here’s the fact: nothing conventional you could do is going to change that, and there is no life-changing hit that is going to fall into your lap that is NOT a nervous decision, because the big obvious movies are going to go elsewhere and you don’t have the IP right now to create them from standard material. Force yourself to muster some confidence about it and do the exact thing right now for which your career will be known in movie history: be the person who makes the tough decisions and sticks with them and makes the unlikely things succeed.”

Universal kept the movie, and released it in October, 2015. It was the kind of nervy, mid-budget drama that Pascal lived to make. It was also the kind of movie that does not play in Sioux City, Bayonne, or Chongqing. “Steve Jobs” lost about fifty million dollars at the box office, according to Fritz. By then, Pascal had been eased out of her position at Sony in classic Hollywood style. When her contract expired, in February, 2015, she was given a “first-look” producing deal.

Aside from one person’s job, what was lost? Fritz sees a bleak future for the big studios, but is surprisingly upbeat about what’s in store for the rest of us. The decline of wide-release movies for grownups has coincided with the rise of ambitious, big-budget storytelling on television, a trade-off Fritz is fine with. “For those of us who simply want to sit down, turn off the lights, and be immersed in the magic of stories told in images on a screen,” he writes, “the future has never looked brighter.” True. But for a book that carefully delineates the causes and effects that have shaped the recent Hollywood past, the reduction of movies to “stories told in images on a screen” is surprisingly ahistorical. How and where the movies reach us has always contributed to the particular power they have to rearrange our moral furniture.

The story of Amy Pascal’s downfall at Sony is unsettling, but the period that preceded her tenure is not widely regarded as a golden age of American cinema. It was, instead, the age of the traditional blockbuster, when a “high concept” and a single A-list star could drive a project from pitch meeting into production and, finally, out to theatres. Until blockbusters arrived—starting in 1975, with Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” in its time the most commercially successful film in history—Hollywood released movies gradually, one set of theatres after another. In the “run-zone clearance system,” a movie would begin with a heavily publicized first run in downtown theatres in major cities, continue on to smaller houses in less affluent or less fashionable parts of the city, and then move out to the suburbs, to smaller cities and towns, and, finally, to rural communities. A movie that was disliked by its first wave of viewers might not continue through the system, and the urban sophisticates who made the initial decision to see it were heavily influenced by the critics.

In the nineteen-twenties, the producer Irving Thalberg recognized that a pattern of distribution implies a pattern of taste-making. From his position, first at Universal and then at M-G-M, he turned Hollywood in the direction of prestige pictures—movies that “emphasized glamour, grace, and beauty,” as one critic put it. As much as three-quarters of M-G-M’s productions were A-class features feeding into the most deluxe of the downtown movie palaces, a business practice that was fortified, year after year in that decade, by an urban industrial boom. A version of this approach to distribution survived for much of the twentieth century—as late as the mid-seventies, a movie could take six months, or even a year, to finish its theatrical run. By then, however, suburbanization had transformed the country. The studios were stuck with a release pattern designed to flatter a social landscape that, by and large, no longer existed. “Jaws” was a masterpiece by a wunderkind director, but it also proved out a new business model: a gimmicky idea, bankable stars, and aggressive television ad campaigns, all of it designed to trigger audience anticipation and drive a massive Friday-night opening across thousands of screens—critics and snobs be damned.

It did not take Hollywood long to see the commercial possibilities, and the blockbuster came to dominate the movie industry. This, it’s been said, signalled the end of the “auteur” era—a magical period in American cinema when film directors were revered as quasi-literary gods. The truth is more complicated. “The decade that gave the movie industry the American auteur also gave it the broad-audience event film,” the agent, producer, and film executive Mike Medavoy notes in “You’re Only as Good as Your Next One” (Atria), an under-read and engaging show-biz memoir. Both trends—a director-driven cinema and market-tested movies packaged out of familiar (or “presold”) elements and familiar faces—exerted an enormous influence on the Hollywood film culture of the time; often both were apparent within a single picture. The tendency toward artistic surprise on the one hand and a highly manipulative familiarity on the other came together and created the tastes and expectations of moviegoers for a generation. What Hollywood blockbuster can’t trace its ancestry to “The Godfather,” “The Exorcist,” “Jaws,” “Rocky,” “Star Wars,” “Annie Hall,” or “Alien”?

For several years, a balance was preserved between commerce and art—or, really, between a standardized production process in search of efficiencies of scale, and creative individuality. Then the machinery of wide release was supplemented by a new technology, VHS. Suddenly, there were video stores all over America that needed to purchase at least one copy of every major new Hollywood movie. In “Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency” (Custom House), an oral history compiled by James Andrew Miller, Tom Hanks recalls the effect that this had on Hollywood in the eighties. “The industry used to be so flush with free money that it was almost impossible to do wrong even with a crappy movie, because here’s why: home video,” he says. By 1986, video sales and rentals were taking in more than four billion dollars. Income from home viewing had surpassed that of theatrical release.

A Blockbuster video store in Bethesda or Prairie Village may seem a world away from the glamour palaces of yore, but they were alike in one respect: they depended on the power of a movie star to signal a picture’s quality. Rows of cardboard VHS boxes featuring Hanks or Julia Roberts replaced the old theatre marquee. Star power was as strong as it had been since Thalberg’s heyday. In the thirties, the actors were owned, more or less outright, by the studios. In the eighties, actors were free agents and Hollywood was prospering. A new era, one ruled not by the studio, but by the talent agent, had begun. It is this era that is presently coming to an end.

Six months before “Jaws” was released, a group of disaffected William Morris agents founded C.A.A. William Morris was a classic mid-century operation, bureaucratic and governed by seniority. “There was little entrepreneurialism,” Michael Ovitz, one of C.A.A.’s founders, says in “Powerhouse.” Ovitz had a plan. He would set aside the more self-serving mythologies of show business, run an eat-what-you-kill shop, and become “the most powerful person in Hollywood.” C.A.A. aggressively signed up A-list talent, then offered studios all-or-nothing deals. Ovitz came as close to being a lone Hollywood hegemon as any one person can—and he did it thanks, in no small part, to an utter lack of sentimentality about the movies. C.A.A. had started out by concentrating on television. When it came to feature films, Ovitz admitted that he was motivated by the desire to destroy William Morris. “Our goal was to break them,” he tells Miller, “and we did; we blew their movie department to nothing.”

He did it with packaging, the practice whereby an agent, or agency, offers up all the relevant talent on a project to the studio. The technique has been around since the advent of radio as a mass medium. But, just as wide release came to dominate theatrical distribution, the C.A.A. package came to dominate the development of wide-release films. The best of these movies—“Caddyshack,” “Trading Places,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Ghostbusters,” “Back to the Future,” all C.A.A. packages—were irreverent, fun, slapdash, and a little cruel. The worst were ostentatious and empty. The very worst, like “Legal Eagles,” were deal memos on celluloid.

Ovitz’s foil for a time was David Puttnam, a highly regarded British film producer. Puttnam had made his signature picture, “Chariots of Fire,” with a first-time director and no stars, and without the aid of Hollywood. It was a commercial triumph and won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He’d débuted films at Cannes six years in a row—“The Mission,” with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons, won the Palme d’Or—and helped launch the careers of Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Adrian Lyne, and Roland Joffé. Puttnam’s movies were producer-driven and serious, and built an audience via a slow graduated-release schedule. He made anti-blockbusters, and did so on budget, without caving in to agents, agent packages, or agency fees. This was attractive to an industry worried about cost inflation. In 1986, Columbia Pictures needed a chairman, and it sought him out.

Puttnam auditioned by flying to Atlanta and handing a heartfelt manifesto to the top brass of the Coca-Cola Company, which owned the studio. He loved America, he explained, because he’d grown up loving American movies. Thalberg was his childhood hero. But something had changed, he believed, and Americans were becoming indifferent to their great cultural patrimony—an indifference that was linked, Puttnam maintained, to how movies were being made and distributed. If he came to Columbia, it would be on a condition. “Talent packages would be out,” he informed Coca-Cola. “If I don’t have your support on this, then I’m the wrong person for you.” He was hired.

Puttnam installed himself in Greta Garbo’s old villa in Coldwater Canyon and spent the following year telling anyone who would listen that serious films could be popular and popular films could be serious. Puttnam’s public comments as the head of a major American movie studio are astonishing for their candor. “If Coca-Cola accidentally created one hundred million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire one hundred million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean,” he said. “What do we do with a crappy movie? We double its advertising budget and hope for a big opening weekend.” A few months later, Puttnam was forced to resign, after Coca-Cola decided to divest itself of Columbia Pictures, which was eventually sold to Sony.

Among Puttnam’s failures during his thirteen months in the position was his inability, or unwillingness, to close a deal with Bill Murray and his agent, Michael Ovitz, on a sequel to “Ghostbusters.” When the movie was finally made, two years later, it set a box-office record in its opening weekend. (The record was broken, one week later, by “Batman.”) A few years ago, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that Sony had plans to turn “Ghostbusters” into a cinematic universe. The first reboot, with an all-female starring cast, was released in 2016. It was produced by Amy Pascal.

When movies were mostly one-offs—and not spinoffs, sequels, reboots, or remakes—they had to be good. A little blunt, too, maybe. Conjuring a universe out of nothing, bringing it to crisis and back again, all in under two hours, required, if nothing else, craftsmanship on a level admired even by European snobs. “The Americans, who are much more stupid when it comes to analysis, instinctively bring off very complex scripts,” Godard said, in 1962. “They also have a gift for the kind of simplicity which brings depth.” No matter how well executed, commercial success for such a film was never guaranteed. Laying out an enormous sum of money on a product whose creation depends upon a harmony of massive egos, and whose final appeal is the result of intangibles, is a terrible basis for a commercial enterprise.

For most of Hollywood history, the movie business has needed a hostage buyer, a customer with little choice but to purchase the product. First, this was the theatre chains, which the studios owned, or controlled, until 1948, when the Supreme Court forced the studios to sell them on antitrust grounds. In the eighties and nineties, video stores partly filled the role. But, increasingly, the hostage buyer is us.

Today, the major franchises are commercially invulnerable because they offer up proprietary universes that their legions of fans are desperate to reënter on almost any terms. These reliable sources of profit are now Hollywood’s financial bedrock. The business model began to take shape, gradually, in the eighties; it solidified a decade ago, when a writer’s strike recalibrated Hollywood’s tolerance for risk. (The global financial crisis played a role as well.) At the same time, digital distribution was on the rise; Netflix, which launched its streaming service early in 2007, after years as a mail-order company, began eating into DVD sales. As the major studios faced the loss of a large and predictable revenue stream, they trimmed their release schedules and focussed more of their efforts on the global mega-brands: Marvel, DC, “Harry Potter,” “The Fast and the Furious,” “Star Wars.” The movie business transitioned from a system dominated by a handful of larger-than-life stars to one defined by I.P. This brought the era shaped by Ovitz to a close.

“Michael Ovitz,” writes Violaine Roussel, in her book “Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies” (University of Chicago Press), “is commonly described as the demiurge responsible for shaping and leading the reconfiguration of the system linking together the main agencies and the major studios.” Roussel is a professor of sociology at the University of Paris, and she spent five years studying the world Ovitz helped create, interviewing movie agents, shadowing them at work, and meeting with their various rivals and counterparts, including top executives at the major studios. In Roussel’s telling, agents are now less like Ovitz than they are like art dealers in the style of Leo Castelli or Paul Durand-Ruel: keepers of secrets, fulfillers of dreams, bearers of bad news. Roussel’s interview subjects speak, repeatedly and sensitively, to the challenge, as she puts it, of converting “the symbolic recognition of talent into (potential) economic transactions.” The agents who talked to Roussel report being on call twenty-four hours a day, and structuring their personal lives around accumulating the social capital that their work demands. This is nothing new, presumably, but there is a fresh note of desolation running through her account.

Where once an agent was, as Roussel puts it, “a creative entrepreneur” whose bread and butter was “her close relationship with star talent,” today a Hollywood agent is “an expert in conducting risk-controlled investment strategies by securing the rights to film franchises and ‘sequelizable’ productions,” someone “whose practice resembles that of certain professionals in the world of finance.” The personal style of agenting has evolved accordingly. As one agent explains, in the old days “you were very interactive.” To close a deal with a producer, you would “get up and step in, you sit in front of them, in the front of the table, you push a picture over.” The ethos now, the agent says, is “clinical, digital, and clean.”

Movie people, Roussel notes, like to signal their status as insiders by referring to Hollywood as a “town.” In the town, everything is personal, everything is business, and everyone knows her place—or doesn’t, at her own peril. Since 2008, the system has become unsure. As it would; for the first time in nearly a century, the system is not being driven by stardom. In the Ovitz era, star power took on two related senses: the power of a performer to carry a picture for moviegoers (think Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman”) and the power of a star to get a picture greenlit—to make a project “real,” as Roussel puts it, using an amusing term of Hollywood art. Both Fritz and Roussel connect the loss of stars’ power to make a picture real to the shift to I.P. But neither connects it to the other vanishing force—the power of a star to carry a film for a wide audience.

In the thirties, Thalberg’s greatest star was the suave William Powell, second only to Clark Gable, in that decade, among Hollywood’s leading men. Thalberg didn’t just sell the ideal of the meritorious swell in the person of Powell; he aspired to be such a figure himself, as did the man in the White House, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The charm, the imperturbability, and the sheer human grace that Powell displayed in “My Man Godfrey” and the “Thin Man” pictures were qualities as rooted in the anxious needs of an audience as they were in the talents of a particular man. In the eighties, when Americans needed to see hustlers on the make treated as demiurges, Tom Cruise was like Michael Ovitz was like Michael Milken.

The preëminence, during the past ten years, of the superhero movie has been accompanied by the loss of the actor as hero, or heroic type. “According to Marvel’s philosophy,” Ben Fritz writes, “the characters, not the actors, were the stars, and pretty much everyone was expendable.” There was no separating Powell from Nick Charles, or Humphrey Bogart from Sam Spade. Is there any connecting Batman to—fill in the blank? The quality of film acting has never been higher, and there is still a craft in scriptwriting and directing that makes one regularly bow in awe. But a minimal standard of human relatability is not being met, on a routine basis, in the medium’s most dominant genre. People who are nothing like us rescuing a world that is nothing like ours is not a recipe for artistic renewal.

Granted, there were limitations in the old model, some of them severe; it is hardly incidental that two of the most popular and interesting movies of the past year, “Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther,” made deliberate efforts to expand the usual demographic of old-fashioned Hollywood heroism, and to push back against the history of sexism and racism that it reflects. But the benchmark for a good movie was once coherence, and this meant more than a competently executed three-act script. It meant the unity of story with character, of character with star persona. The whole shebang was given life by a highly improbable marriage between our narcissism and our idealism. In this model, the movie theatre was a special kind of institution, where a primitive instinct for action and drama came together with a desire to banish our residual cruelty, if for no other reason than that it wouldn’t play.

This year, Netflix is set to release more original movies than Sony, Disney, and Warner Bros. combined. The company has taken aim at the primacy of theatrical release, in an apparent effort to make online streaming the prevailing distribution model for movies. Even Sony’s old standbys are now making movies for Netflix. Adam Sandler signed a deal with the company in 2014, and Will Smith made his first Netflix film last year. Smith has admitted to a sense of loss. “There’s something about the big screen that does something to people’s minds,” he told an audience at Comic-Con last July. But the Internet and social media have changed things, he said, adding, “You almost can’t make new movie stars anymore, right?” Cinemas are already in danger of becoming like the church in the Philip Larkin poem: half-abandoned houses of “awkward reverence,” with an aura that intensifies as fewer and fewer people go. Over the next few years, movies may lose altogether the aspect of public solitude, of being alone together in a crowd, in the dark, marvelling as spectacle devolves upon the human face. At that point, they’ll just be more screen time. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the May 28, 2018, issue, with the headline “Clobbering Time.”

Stephen Metcalf hosts Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” podcast and is currently at work on a book about the nineteen-eighties.